My second Star Wars novel, Deceived, will be released on December 28th in both hardcover and audio format.   This will be the first time one of my novels has received audio book treatment and I’m kinda-sorta nervous about it.

Writing is (obviously) a very personal, and necessarily private/solitary endeavor, but it’s VERY much so for me.  I internalize the entire process and nothing gets out until I’m done.  I don’t use beta readers.  I don’t read passages aloud to myself.  Heck, I’ve never once gone back and read an old book (though I have skimmed passages to make sure I get this  or that fact right).

For me,  there’s this window of time in which I create the thing, all by my lonesome, with no external feedback of any kind, after which I turn it loose into the wild and that is that.  I don’t want to see it again.  I’ve poured myself into it and I’m done with it (though I obviously make an exception for the editorial process; still, as I’ve mentioned before, editorial revisions on all of my novels have been very, very light).

Anyway, I feel weird about  someone reading my novel aloud.   It feels like externalizing the internal.  It shouldn’t feel different, I know.  After all, the voice actor will be reading aloud the same words that you all read in the privacy of your head, so there’s no additional ‘exposure’ as such.  Yet it still feels different to me.  Odd.

Anyway, I’ll have to listen to it (it’s my first audio book, after all!) but I expect to be skeeved out a bit.  But notwithstanding the skeevy feeling, I’ll probably be smiling the whole time.